Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user’s needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90’s, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn’t teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

  • krashmo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Make default programs support opening webp files and the problem goes away. Until that happens users have every reason to convert files from a format that is a pain in the ass to open.

  • Mr PoopyButthole@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Nothing to do with users. Operating systems don’t support it in their default file managers and viewers.

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Lemmy converts all uploads to webp.

    Also the reason people don’t like it is because gallery apps and the like are behind the times, so you can’t just, open webps, sometimes.

    • Krompus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy converts all uploads to webp.

      Does it? I downloaded this post from Liftoff, it’s a jpg.

    • KjoeLjan@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      And Discord doesn’t like webp as format for custom emotes. That’s the main reason I’ve been converting them to png or gif

  • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Lack of good integrated support in Windows and Mac, as well as no native way to convert from webp means it is good when it is good, but infuriating when it is bad. If you just need something to work, you don’t want to fight with converting image formats, you just want to move on.

    I supported the idea of webp, still do, but it’s 100% less widely supported on legacy software, and the OS does nothing to interpret for those software packages.